The present paper presents the main results obtained by the Italian Working Group on Natural Esters recently promoted by the University of Rome "La Sapienza", the Firefighters Authority, the Department for Geological Survey of Italy (ISPRA) and the Department of Technological Innovations, Safety of Product, Plants and Anthropic Settlements of the National Institute for Insurance against Accidents at Work (INAIL). This WG on Natural Esters was set up at the beginning of 2016 with the aim of establish the effective possibility of reducing the risks to human health and the environment, through increased spread of innovative transformers insulated with natural esters. In the paper are presented and discussed the following topics: main properties of natural esters and mineral oils; fire risk evaluation of distribution and transmission transformers, including an experimental comparison of fire behavior of natural esters and mineral insulating oils; risk evaluation and different remedial solution for leakage and spill of natural esters and mineral insulating oils.

Industrial production has brought increased wellbeing in the last years, but the amount of solid waste has undoubtedly increased. Thus, open dumpsites and landfills have been created throughout the world, with serious impacts on the environment and public health. In such a context, occupational health and safety (OHS) issues related to workers that have to deal with landfill characterization or management have not been considered sufficiently. To reduce such a research gap, in 2019 a research project started in Italy on OHS risk assessment in landfills. In fact, in such facilities, workers can be subjected to direct contact with the polluted environment and might not be completely aware of the entity and type of pollution (e.g., in open dumpsites). Starting with the analysis of INAIL data on accidents at work which occurred in Italy during the period 2008–2019, a specific risk analysis was carried out with the goal of defining risk determinants and profiles by means of K-means cluster analysis. Such an analysis allowed us to recognize the use of work equipment and the work environment as the main determinants of the accidents on the one hand, and the “driver of the excavator” as the most risky activity on the other. The achieved results take a step forward towards the characterization of occupational health and safety issues in landfills. Accordingly, the research outcomes represent a basis on which to address further research work in this field.

Risk assessment of contaminated sites is typically applied following a tiered approach with increasing levels of complexity. In the standard risk-based corrective action (RBCA) procedure issued by the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM), the site-specific evaluation is carried out using fate and transport models that require a relatively large amount of input data. In this work, we introduce a site-specific score index system for a preliminary assessment of the inhalation risks related to contaminants in soil or groundwater that resembles the modeling approaches typically adopted for chemical risk assessment in the field of industrial hygiene. In the developed system, a risk index for the outdoor and indoor volatilization pathways is calculated as the ratio between the calculated concentration at the point of exposure for the contaminant of concern and the corresponding acceptable concentration in air. The concentration at the point of exposure for each contaminant of concern is estimated through simple algorithms that involve a limited number of indexes that depend on the parameters that affect the exposure scenario. This qualitative assessment is then converted into a semi-quantitative approach by introducing scaling factors that were calibrated using the ASTM RBCA fate and transport models. The procedure was validated against the standard RBCA procedure by performing a simple Monte Carlo analysis with 10,000 simulations with randomly varying site-specific parameters. The developed score index system resulted in a conservative estimate of the risks, with percentages of false negatives lower than 1% and false positives lower than 15%. This means that the developed system allows one to screen out sites from further evaluations in more than 80% of cases, while ensuring a conservative estimate of the expected risks. The application to a real case study of a contaminated site confirmed the suitability of the developed approach.

Despite the international efforts to promote the circular economy and waste recycling, landfilling is still a common practice for waste disposal around the world, with considerable impacts on the environment and public health. However, while such a sector was addressed in many countries through a consistent environmental legislative framework, safety management for workers in landfills has not been sufficiently considered by policymakers. Moreover, in the scientific literature OHS issues related to landfill management were not deeply addressed through the elaboration of specific procedures. Hence, with the goal to evaluate the existence of specific risk profiles in such working contexts, the paper provides a contribution through a data-driven approach. In fact, the study contains a detailed investigation of the biggest Italian occupational accident database (powered by INAIL) with reference to the landfill management sector, according to a methodology specifically designed to employ the European Statistics on Accidents at Work (ESAW) codes as data filters. After selecting a sample of n.78 accidents, likely to have occurred in Italian landfills in the period 2008/2019, accidents' dynamics were assessed for each event with reference to the use of work equipment. The results achieved allowed us to bring to light the potential risks related to this determinant. Thus, potential risk management measures were defined in order to improve the safety management of work equipment in this specific context.